Category Archives: Culture

November 2, 2012 · 11:33 pm

DERREN BROWN’S ‘APOCALYPSE’

A lot of interest here has been about blogs on ‘illusionist’ and hypnotist Derren Brown. Watching the second part of his ‘Apocalypse’ is a good chance to plug that great thriller, that does not have the power to push itself, The Godhead Game, based around this year’s supposed ‘Apocalypse’, the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar, this December, 2012. (Available but flopping on Amazon.) It’s point is precisely the opposite of ends of the world, since, for all the violence or fear, life and energy are very hard to destroy, as are repeating stories.

Perhaps Derren Brown is a kind of modern saint, though having dabbled in religion, or perhaps feeling a victim to it, he would probably hate the word. But the push and premise of his programme, and ‘set up’ of a character who faced a created Apocalypse, and the ‘infected’, was exactly right, and deeply human, namely to test and bring out the best in his ‘subject’. The lingering question at the end though, namely do we actually need fear, as the spin of the coin on which we all exist, succeed or fail, was immediately preempted by the announcement of the coming programme about faith; Religion: Faith and Fear. The ‘problem’ with the programme was that it already drew on well established cultural ‘clichés’, in all those zombie films. Indeed the set up was an exact replay of one infection and zombie film. Fine, it exactly reflects why such dramas are made themselves.

Which feeds into the question of what drama is for and why talking of science or faith is so much just about language. Derren Brown pushes the boundaries of illusion, hypnotic control, studies of the psyche and what reality really is, if anything at all, to the limits, and there too is his genius. Perhaps he will try to touch what it is very hard to answer, namely is there truth in ‘Jungian’ ideas, that involve such notions as some ‘Collective Unconscious’, that may not be an individual experience alone of dreams, or the powerful unconscious or subconscious, perhaps controlled by a brain centre that can be hypnotised and controlled to an extraordinary extent. To the extent it can stop the nerve functions and make a body in ice cold water think it is in a warm bath, and will actually die. Then that is no more remarkable than dysfunctions people are born with, so that they do not have ‘ordinary’ nerve functions at all, which itself questions what any reality is. But the wider question is what any social reality is too, and what is happening all around us, even in the entertainment staged down a TV screen, as so much is created to advertise or control.

Still, Brown is both a genius and very exciting and inspiring about what he seeks to challenge and examine about a ‘reality’ we all appear to share, but is always so much about illusions, in our experiences and perceptions of the ‘outside world’ and an inner world too. He is doing what that Hollywood movie ‘The Game’ did and would it not be wonderful if we all played that ‘game’ with each other, but to heal and to bring out the most extraordinary in each one of us? The question, as both animal and ‘Man’, is do we need enemies and fear, and what vision and growth exists beyond that when the walls really come tumblin’ down? For those ‘loonies’ who talk some Mayan truth, for whatever reason, perhaps there are always higher states of consciousness.

PA PRESS

ps Just to be a little tedious the Greek meaning of Apocalpsye is not those four horsemen at all, but something revealed.

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November 2, 2012 · 9:43 pm

WONDERFUL AUTUMN WATCH!

What is the love and genius at the heart of British TV, perhaps the strange UK, with the likes of our National Treasure, Sir David Attenborough, for all the supposed fakery about Polar Bears, or the just viewed wonderful and delightful Autumn Watch? It’s exactly what and why they quoted Gandhi, that the key measure of any society’s moral advancement is how it treats is animals, even with all our unkindness to chickens, yum, yum. The people on Autumn Watch are so natural, and naturally eccentric, so passionate about what they do, love and share, it is as entrancing as watching the footage of animals in the wild, or interacting in the studio.

For this ‘animal writer’, who forgot nature, forgot his readers and fans and forg0t where the power and source of his writing came from, it just brings joy. Only readers are right about whatever happened in America, and all that counts is the vision and passion that stories based in the wild bring. But of course, for love of animals, there is us as well, and love of us as well, in all that difficult ‘moral advancement’, competing, seeking, trying to understand, and such extraodinary and eccentic animals too. But apart from anything else, those passionate enthusiasts on Autumn Watch have so much fun!

DCD

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September 26, 2012 · 3:31 am

PHOENIX ARK CLOSES

To add to the flaming post below, far too long for most to read, I’m closing a blog. It’s been a source of anguish, invasion and neurosis itself, but with respect to truth, much good work, and warnings too, I’m keeping it up online for at least six months. My strange “J’Accuse”, even if I blame myself too. As for Abrams, two women key to my life, an ex and my editor, wrecked a person, work, trusts and broke the most fundamental legal principles too, completely hand in glove and lying through their teeth. But the human and creative damage they stood over is just unbelievable. It’s key moment was that “Hew, Screw and Glue” with that creep of a man in London, that rather sums up the whole scandal, but for many reasons they should answer the charge that the ‘evil’ is fully theirs, not just claw their way to the top, though I guess a business is perfectly entitled to set Hew, Screw and Glue as its real benchmark. Quite a family at “Family Abrams”. You can try writing to my ‘editor’ too, who used The Sight in her own Abrams job interview. Time to thank real friends, and many readers, but get a life again! There might just be a slight chance. DCD

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ps as to Andrew Marr, at least he reversed his Super Injunction, and it’s really those reconstructions that were so….

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September 25, 2012 · 3:06 pm

THE SHAKESPEARE INSCRIPTION

phoenixark

you underestimate the power of Roper´s argument. To find words by chance in a grille is easy. To find a readable sentence is VERY improbable. To find a readable sentence with a relevant bearing on the subject simply doesn’t happen. A grille built on the figure 31 will give us PAT SIP NO FLEAS, on 32 HE YET HIT AS COT, 35: TOY TIE OR SO, and so on. But only a 34-column grille will give an answer to the challenge put to the reader of the monument: READ IF THOU CANST WHOM ENVIOUS DEATH HATH PLAST WITHIN THIS MONUMENT (for Shakespeare). Combined with the anomalies in the text, which serves the hidden message to be readable, the figure 34 which has a certain correspondence to the name hidden and the fact that the concealed words come in clusters, strengthen the argument that the whole thing was put there by design. Moreover since the person hidden in the message happens to be the same as the one person in history with the strongest known connections, biographical or literary or anything, to the texts we call the Shakespeare canon, should be enough to make anyone who cares about truth at least a bit curious.

IF, I say if, the Folio had been printed without a name on the first page, who would we today consider the Author? A man who left no traces of a literary life AT ALL, like William-of-Stratford, or a man whose literary fingerprints are left on virtually every page, like Edward de Vere? The answer is obvious, but we have a paradigm shift to go through before the world is ready for it, and such things are painful experiences to many people. So painful actually that the wish to stay in the phase of denial can be lifelong.

(pardon my English, I am from Northern Europe)

Many thanks for that. For a shortish reply please see the comments pages in The Earl fo Oxford, William Ray and a Leering hydrocephalic idiot. To go there CLICK HERE and go down to comments, at the bottom right, in blue.

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September 24, 2012 · 2:31 pm

ANDREW MITCHELL, DAVE HARTNETT, TRESPASSING SCUM AND THE WINDOW ON THE ESTABLISHMENT?

Boy, if you think Andrew Mitchell had it bad, you should see ‘Robert’s‘ remarks to some rather clever, elegant protestors, giving a Golden Handshake ‘award’ at Oxford Uni…trespassing scum that they were. Set the dogs on them! ‘No, Robert, really, you’ll curdle the port.’ Click Here

ps If we posted about not hounding Andrew Mitchell too much, we’re on the protestor’s side. Does an England like that really still exist?

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September 24, 2012 · 8:54 am

THE END OF HISTORY AS WE KNOW IT!

Fukayama, what do you do with a journalist whose nose for sniffing out truth might have been a tad bunged up by taking out his own Super Injunction? You have the all compassionate BBC slash the budgets and behind the scenes talent, then give us ANDREW MARR’S HISTORY OF THE WORLD. BBC 1, Yesteryear. “And God divided the waters and made the Heaven and the Earth and Adam, Eve and possibly Transexuals, to dwell therein, or in Middlesex, and saw that it was Good, and Man made the BBC and CGI and Andrew Marr’s History and everyone saw that it was awful and turned off.”

Except that it is so side splittingly funny, it is almost worth watching. With terrifyingly tacky historical reconstructions, to match Mr Marr’s up to the minute journalese and ‘just like Eastenders’ comparisons, including an ‘Out of Africa’ moment and a CGI sequence stolen straight from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – mind the exciting drop – we got big-turning-points-in-astonishing-but-troubled Human History, as wise Mr Marr bestrode the plastic world like a colossal twit.

So we SAW the Mother of Mankind, from whom we are extraordinarily all genetically descended, except the poor Sub Saharans, not a bad bit actually, then nasty Neolithics hunting down cranially challenged Neanderthals (although, hush, scientists argue about it, and Mr Marr proves elegant Neanderthals are still among us). Then ‘Caveman wos here’ handprints in France, with not one thrill of real wonder because reconstruction kills wonder, to the 11,000 year old equivalent of the Cat’s Eye – you got it, woman invents the animal-bone knitting needle. Thus giving us domestic sewing, fitted clothes, and why Commissioning editors despise the public and love those dinky little symbols at Ralph Lauren. On to Anatolia and, yes it must be, underfloor-overheating Ancestor Worship. Do you ever get the feeling you are being stitched up? Mr Marr, the tapes and the production crew should all be immediately buried in the Leicester car park where they just dug up Richard III, who was a GOOD KING.

So to reconstructed women on Tigris bank, suddenly pondering simpleton grass-eaters, to invent the SEED and AGRICULTURE. Eureka. The heavens shattered, lighting broke and they really did give three minutes to little round stone wall and woman watching single seed sprout. ‘I shall pedal the window box franchise and move to Hollywood’. The tears of laughter started to burst like the banks of the badly reconstructed Yellow River. ‘And you know, there really is evidence there was once a big world Flood?’ Never! Thence to Egypt and Man invents writing, LAW and the whipped tomb raider. Not all those boring Pharaohs, but what its like down there at street reporting level.

If Mr Marr is one of us though, or one of them, he makes the study of history completely pointless, by engaging in modern relativisms so extreme we should have stayed up the trees. Which is why, like travel writing, you should never give history to journalists, but only Sirs Kenneth Clarke, or perhaps David Attenborough, although at least Sir David defiantly sticks to what he knows and loves so deeply. Like that time Andrew hung out for a night in an Indian slum, he should remember his giving us the experience ‘as they experience it’ is just not the same, since he is always about to be whisked back to White City. David Ike was right, TV is evil. Then TV journalism these days is just a chance to climb The Shard in public, visit expensive Shanghai hotels or become a National Treasure.

It is hard to entirely dislike Andrew Marr though and don’t fear, in an hour, Civilisation had arrived and we reached The Minoans. Phew. But this is top scoop, so we learn the hot-off-the-press news that Sir Arthur Evans’s Super Injunction was breached, and he really rebuilt in 1920’s Voguish Art Deco, while the Mayans might have had a dark side too. No Minotaurs or Labyrinthine clichés here though, heavens no, but Andrew squatting by real stones, with truly authentic scientific evidence of blood sacrifice, a warning from history, and then a wailing, knife wielding priestess warning from TV land, only worthy of Up Pompei.

Of course archaeology and science wins the day with pre-history, but history is not a science but art, itself an act of civilising, and this was not it. Who can wait for the joys to come? As every cut-n-past moment is pulled out of the Lady Bird books, to bring us ancient Greece, Alexander The Great, awful Empires, but why the present Queen is the pinnacle of all human life, God Bless you Maam.

David Clement-Davies

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September 21, 2012 · 12:24 pm

THE DA VINCI CODE PROVED TRUE!

Perhaps it’s the wonderful end of obsessions with sex as original sin, women as evil, or the proof of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code fictions. Perhaps Catholic priests will now be allowed to live happily married lives. It was no Biblical story that forced in the idea, for instance, that Mary herself was conceived by Immaculate Conception, but the decrees of Church councils.

Karen King, a Harvard professor of Divinity, has just discovered a snippet of ancient parchment with words to the effect “and Jesus said, my wife…..who may become my disciple.” The Da Vinci Code may be a dreadful read, in literary terms, but it is also a very clever page turner. It builds on rather astonishing ideas about Da Vinci then, Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene, and out of books like The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail. We still think The Godhead Game should be seen as a Da Vinci Code of Mayan World End ideas, this year, but that’s special pleading! In the meantime, what a blessing for debate, life and different kinds of sacred love, even if Christians did get so upset about a film they misunderstood, The Last Temptation of Christ. Ghandi used to renew his marriage vows every day.

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September 20, 2012 · 12:24 pm

THE GODHEAD GAME COMES TRUE?

There are three months to go until “The Mayan End of The World“, but from our excellent sources around the globe come two highlighted articles:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/9553837/Israel-stages-largest-snap-exercise-in-years.html

http://news.sky.com/story/987227/anti-jihad-adverts-to-run-in-new-york-subway

No-one likes a prophet much, but if events in the thriller The Godhead Game by David Clement-Davies are coming true then, like Obama’s predicted election this year, the whole story also follows the issue of Iran’s nuclear capability, indeed the threat of nuclear conflict, in A Game of Secrets, A Hunt for Skulls, A Battle of Spies.

While exploring the whole Mayan story too, it is more optimistic than being ‘milarianist’ though. If it does invite everyone, including Israel and Iran, to stop replaying old attitudes, and wake up to something extraordinary about mankind, nature and reality, that must include all of us. Just as its hero receives a strange email, at the heart of the FBI in Washington, inviting him to “change his life forever.” It is also about how science and ‘religion’ have split dangerously into two opposing kinds of language and need to be redefined. Why not send an email yourselves and invite people to read it? To get a copy CLICK HERE, but for a snatch of the Phoenix Ark ‘book trailer’, click on the arrow below:

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September 19, 2012 · 6:15 pm

MITT ROMNEY’S TELLING IDIOCY

We had some sympathy when Mitt Romney mouthed off about the appalling murder of a brave and highly regarded Ambassador in Libya, although America surely cannot afford a man as President who is not more politically aware, and in control. Just as a US spokesman on Newsnight said it was not about a rather awful film, despite any defence of filmic ‘free speech’, or Libyans all being fundamentalists and up in arms either, but specific terrorists targeting of an embassy. In such circumstances though, especially during an election, words and emotions are bound to run high. Perhaps those advisors are failing again.

But now comes a mobile phone film and his comments about forty-seven percent of Americans being effectively “on the social”. Unfortunate that everyone is on film nowadays, or in fear of it, like Gordon Brown’s captured outburst about that “stupid woman”. Itself oddly corrosive to real freedom of expression, even, at times, healthy democracy. Which needs politicians in charge of their own consciences, not push button slaves to a politically correct electorate, nor the supposed outrage of the media. Who would want to be a politician these days, and if you don’t get brave or good people, you probably get the government you deserve. God help us when the Drones arrive.

It also appears, rather startlingly over here, that 47% of Americans do not pay income tax, although they pay other kinds of tax. Perhaps it will spark a useful debate then, as another intelligent young Republican commentator said on Newsnight. But that film footage does so clearly show the stamp and thinking of a man who can talk so brazenly about how to play an election, and dismiss whoever those 47% are, or why, including many Republicans. He has just very possibly lost himself an election, though we feel Obama would have won it anyway. We’ll see in these coming televised debates how they stand up and how an electorate really listens. It’s just so cynical though, if both sides are clearly capable of that, and just such a misunderstanding too, both of how so many people neither want to cadge off the “State”, nor very often are capable of finding a fair playing field in a world that can bull-dose over them, especially at particular points of crisis in their lives. Hence banks bending over backwards to peddle credit, but cutting the rug from under small business when the crisis hit. But also ignorant of what it means for everyone to have and be given some stake in their society.

We still think most truly great US presidents have been instinctive Democrats too, or actual ones, but the real issue is not just welfare, but the growing disparity between the haves and have nots, and the imbalance between being on the ladder, having a chance of getting on it, and being wiped out falling off it, as those in the money pot get openly protected by a system not allowed to fail. Money is a class system in America too though, as big as any UK class system. Instinct here says the world does not owe anyone a living, experience that some social intervention is not only inevitable, in building cities, services and laws that protect us all, it is profoundly civilising. It is also necessary to stimulate economies. Obama is a very civilised man, if a bit red in the face when he made the fabulous gaff of talking through God Save The Queen at Buck Palace, poor love. We wonder if Romney is. But it is the gap and the glaring abuses that are causing anti-capitalism riots, or confusion and fear everywhere about how the system works, and if Romney thinks that somehow irrelevant, he should just be voted down as being an idiot.

PA PRESS

For a further article on the election Click here

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September 19, 2012 · 11:41 am

TRAVEL WRITING AND HOW IT STUMBLED WITH A SHORT WALK IN THE HINDU KUSH

Every world is changing, even as you step into it. But my own experience of how the world changed in travel writing was growing up reading the likes of Eric Newby, he of A Short Walk in The Hindu Kush. Like Patrick Lee Fermour, Newby was one of the gentlemen greats, who came to travel edit the pages of the Observer, and when I went out to The North West Frontier, lots of people took his very funny Short Walk with them, including me. How travel writing has changed since then, and how our knowledge of Pakistan and Afghanistan too. No longer an adventure, more a horror story. But then all writing is the mediation of supposed universal experience, through a particular consciousness, as language and its precise use mediates too. It was why it was a little funny, talking of “gentlemen greats” to find Country Life editing an article about a polo match on the Shandur Pass, from my line about a local man peeing in a lake, to his “relieving himself”. Up in the Hindu Kush folk pee, they do not relieve themselves, if “this is true, throughout the shires, that horses sweat but Man perspires!”

I was always freelance, trying to write in papers like The Telegraph, The Times or Guardian, specialising in stories related to wildlife or environmentalism. It never brought in any money, but it did give the chance to do some extraordinary trips, and to write too. So I heard little stories like an editor bumping into Jan Morris, James in a dress by then, and telling her travel writers had charmed lives. Hmmm. Jan Morris is certainly a deeply charmed writer. The problem was the days when you could sound off as real traveller and writer were also morphing into the days when you had to write about the quality of hotel shower heads, and so sell the travel industry itself, to support a paper’s advertising revenues.

The democratically thin end of that enormous wedge is the Internet and the likes of Trip Advisor, where self-appointed experts apparently cause horror stories complaining about the number of tea bags, or the position of the kettle in Bed and Breakfasts. In trying to set up potentially interesting pieces though, with prominent companies, that could be a little corrosive of your independence too. But there was also the fact that no journalists took travel writing very seriously, as they should have done, and often saw it as a chance for freebies, or a holiday from the real fight. Art though, and finding a real voice in writing, and travelling the world, is the fight too.

I fell very foul of The Telegraph when I was attacked by an editor, and many editors on the inside love their bits of power, for daring to be rude about Devon and Cornwall, although I wasn’t really. That was the impression that came out from a piece about history there, or England’s story, notably falling off our own maritime identity into American dreams and longings at “Westwood Ho”, that had been severely slashed in print, causing several “points of view” complaints from the public. Hey ho. Travel writing at its best is writing at its best, but rather than glossy food fests, posh hotels or book stunts like crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub, it should be brought back in print, if only as a leader to other articles more obviously engaged in selling things. One place that dedicates itself to travel writing as writing, almost purely in fine reprints, is Eland Books.

DCD

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